Borrowed Time
by Margit
Summary: What if' fic. How Eponine's story might have gone, if she had survived the barricades and never delivered Cosette's letter to Marius. Constructive feedback is appreciated.
1. Prologue

It was not in her nature to regret. To regret something was to assume that life could have been any other way, that a different means might have brought about a different end; to contemplate such a possibility was to her an exercise in futility. One did not regret the blow of an angry hand any more than one regretted an undelivered letter; both actions had been dictated by a higher power than she. She had only been the messenger.  
  
And a rather poor one at that, but it would all end for the better, wouldn't it? Of course it would.  
  
No letter meant no Cosette. Without the intervention of Cosette's letter, her Marius (oh, not Cosette's Marius, but now Eponine's!) would be left without a single grain of hope worth preserving himself for, there should be nothing to keep him apart from Eponine, nothing but the yawning abyss of death.   
  
If she could not share a life with him, she would share his death. Naturally, in the girl's feverish mind, they both would live on and love one another until the death of age parted them rather than the more immediate end that lurked just beneath the shadow of the barricade.   
  
What Eponine had not foreseen was that the National Guard would be quite so good at their jobs while the brave men holding the barricades would be quite so ill-prepared for their own. There was something to be said, also, for the precision of the National Guards' aim. That was a skill to which she could testify to personally.   
  
It had all flashed before her eyes - the garret where she had been a Jondrette, the inn where she had been a Thénardier, a blur of poverty and rat bites and ill fitting rags that provided neither warmth or modesty; all this swirled through her spinning head until it looked like nothing more than a muddle of muddy colors, a bruise. It might have occurred to her, had she not lost quite so much blood, that there was nothing that she would terribly mind leaving behind.  
  
Ah! But hope was not abandoned yet, it returned anew when the slightly out of focus face of her love appeared before her. She wanted so badly to cry out, but the sound died on her lips. Surely this was a hallucination, was it not? Nothing more than her mind seeing what it wished to, as it did after too many days without food and too many nights spent dreaming about a young man who represented something better. And here he was again.  
  
Was she dreaming, now as she felt his lips press down against her brow? It was so hard to tell, Eponine's senses were fooling her and the gunshots exploded like fireworks around her head and a moment later the world slipped out from under her. 


	2. Recovery

Consciousness came more painfully than death had, one chasing the other away. Where was she? On a patch of pavement that was damp with blood. Was she alive? Unmercifully so. Where was Monsieur Marius? Long gone by now.   
  
Eponine would know little else about the night at the barricades until another year had passed, though she would think of nothing else. She would think also of that last glimpse of Monsieur Marius that she had caught through heavy lids, though as time passed his visage would waver and become distorted as if viewed through a screen of smoke. It would become crushingly clear that she knew very little indeed about the object of her affections.   
  
The recovery was excruciating in both slowness and pain. There were many times, countless times, when Eponine dragged her clouded mind back into waking only long enough to beg God to let her die. These unanswered prayers proved yet again that the many cries of the poor begging for mercy, be it from God or from man, are so numerous that a single girl's voice is lost in the roar and never heard or answered.   
  
Months rolled by, snatches of conversations hovered over the invalid's head. The charitable doctor who waded through the slums with his black bag of cracked leather, a voice making a vague effort to persuade her to lap at the dish of oily broth that was periodically jabbed at her dry lips. There were other memories, the time that she awoke at an insistent tug at the bandage wrapped around her disfigured hand only to find that it was no more than a mouse hoping to drag a scrap of lint away to build his nest with.   
  
The doctor, with his smile that parted thin lips to display a chipped yellow graveyard of teeth, had told Eponine gently that her hand would not recover so well as the rest of her had. The scar from where the Guardsman's bullet had dashed through her torso would heal into an ugly red twist of flesh, easily hidden beneath a proper dress (Eponine had wanted to laugh at the remark, wondering when it would be that she ever owned a proper frock! She would have laughed in that doctor's face, if only it hadn't hurt her chest so badly to do so.) However, it was where her hand had 'stopped' that very same bullet that had done her all of this damage, that would be Eponine's battle scar for the rest of her days. She was left with a twisted claw, like an old washerwoman's that had been crippled and colored an angry red from a lifetime of labor. Two fingers missing, the rest useless, a lump of flesh that promised Eponine that she would never be a nimble fingered street rat again.   
  
Her father would not have been happy with this prospect, but Eponine didn't know where to find him even if she'd wanted to. She didn't trouble herself to look. 


	3. Discovery

Sitting on a bench, swaddled in shawls and with a wrinkled face hidden deep inside the cavernous depths of a black bonnet, an old woman was crumbling a perfectly good loaf of bread for a flock of thankless pigeons that only crowded more and more tightly around the bent figure. Eponine watched the scene from a distance across the public gardens and ignored the pangs of hunger that stabbed through her stomach. The birds were dining better than she would today.   
  
She had lived a year of her life on her back, and not even for profit. That may well change within the near future, for there weren't many professions available for what Eponine had become by the end of her recovery. Her crippled hand meant that honest work was out of the question, as well as most dishonest work. Her emaciated body, never healthy to begin with, had wasted away until she was no more than a grotesque stick drawing of a woman. She would be hard pressed to find a man desperate enough or poor enough that he cared to buy what she had to sell.  
  
The sky was overcast with a springtime rain threatening to tumble down over the heads of the strolling couples at any minute, the trees and grass of the gardens glowed with that unearthly green of new growth that comes after a winter. Eponine stopped to catch her breath against one such tree, clutching at the budding leaves to hold herself upright while she wheezed. It seemed that she couldn't walk ten steps these days without sapping her strength. When her fit had passed, the bedraggled urchin lifted her head and caught sight of a man that she had almost begun to believe had never existed at all.   
  
It was Monsieur Marius.   
  
This man did not walk with the swift gait of the boy she remembered from the Gorbeau tenement, who always wore the same shabby suit and kept his gaze discreetly on the ground in front of him as if in the hope that the favor would be returned by passersby. This man wore a greatcoat of what was surely the most expensive wool and kept his eyes trained not on the ground, but instead on the cane with which he guided his steps. Every now and again, it seemed that he forgot to use the cane at all and walked quite well without it. Not all invalids, as Eponine was, are so eager to abandon and forget their injury, even when the wounds have long since healed. The man was alone and when he did occasionally raise his head, his fine features wore a look of hopelessness.   
  
Standing as still as one of the statues that dotted the park, Eponine watched the boy who she had pinned her every desire onto walk down the path of the garden with the air of a devastated man of twice his years. Oh, there had been a time when she would have chased after him and preened and pranced about him in oblivion to the fact that all he saw was a pitiable child who could barely be qualified as a female, much less claim to be of the same species as his beloved Cosette.   
  
It hadn't mattered that she knew nothing of Marius's life, that he cared nothing to know of her own existence, he had simply been near and been kind and been just another thing in life that was not for Eponine to have. She knew now, with a wisdom that had been gained at no small price, that her girlish infatuation had been less with the man than with what the man might have promised - a warm bed, fine clothes to wear, hot meals, a hand that stroked rather than a hand that struck.   
  
Tucking her bad hand into her ragged shawl to hide it, Eponine turned her back on the disappearing figure of Marius and walked very slowly out of the gardens and back into the embrace of the street. 


	4. Epilogue

The winter of 1833 was harsh, many of the less fortunate Parisians perished in the freeze, as they did every year. Marius Pontmercy passed the worst of the season sitting stoically by the fireside in his Grandfather's parlor, with servants who had known him since childhood and who discreetly passed through the rooms as though neither he nor they existed. His cane always rested nearby and he continued to use it until one day when Monsieur Gillenormand directed Basque to dispose of the superfluous object that his grandson no longer needed, but insisted on using still. A fine walking stick with a sculpted silver head mysteriously appeared in its stead.   
  
In the nights, Marius dreamt of Cosette.   
  
Elsewhere in Paris, a young woman grown old by hardship spent her last winter of mortality begging strangers to pity her enough to cast a coin at her frozen feet. She took up new haunts and would shoot a look of wild suspicion at anyone who mistook her for a girl who was once called Eponine. Children hid behind their mothers' skirts when they saw her disfigured hand. When the night finally arrived that she gave in to the luxury of death, this miserable creature did not depart with thoughts of a dark haired man who once kissed her forehead. Instead, her thoughts turned to a younger sister who was lost in the ether, of a looming mother who knotted ribbons into tight bows with swollen red fingers, and of a kitten warm in her lap as she cradled it before a roaring hearth.   
  
In life, Marius had been the catalyst that had brought her to this icy avenue at the end of her life and not even his memory could be troubled to visit her deathbed. He was not missed. 


End file.
